Digital Supplement: Absalom, Absalom! and the Digital Humanities

Johannes Burgers

This interactive essay acts as a supplement to the long-form essay available in the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom!. It includes visualizations that are not possible to represent in print, and also functions as a standalone essay that explores Absalom, Absalom! along three different axes: Characters, Events, and Language.

Introductions

Absalom, Absalom! is a notoriously difficult text.

Told from multiple, fragmentary, and contradictory perspectives through a highly convoluted stream-of-consciousness narration, the text resists any reading that establishes an ultimate meaning.

and Complications

In that spirit, this supplement does not provide an over-arching explanation of the text, but uses different visualizations to understand different aspects of the text:

  • Characters
  • Locations
  • Events
  • Language

Characters

“money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family — incidentally of course, a wife”

Literary Demography

The Digital Yoknapatawpha Digital Yoknapatawpha database contains every character who appears in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fictions.

Each character has a set of attribute information, including their race, class, gender, number, rank, and vitality.

With this information, we can model the composition of the entire character population. . . .

This model is a literary demography

One of the most salient pieces of demographic information in Absalom, Absalom! is race.

Race

As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism. - Toni Morrison, Conversations

Racial segregation was a central feature of the American South before the Civil Rights Movement.

Faulkner was highly sensitive to how this artificial ‘color line’ structured social relations.

Measuring Race

There are 194 unique characters in Absalom, Absalom!.

The overwhelming majority of these characters are White.

Narrative Presence

Simply counting the total number of characters in a text does not account for the number of times they occur in the text.

Statistically speaking, there is only one Moor in Shakespeare’s Othello, but as he appears in nearly every scene he is one of the most present characters.

We can weight for character presence by calculating how often they occur in an event.

Character Count vs. Character Presence

Weighting by narrative presence actually underscores the presence of White characters more.

Character Count vs. Character Passing

Meanwhile, the number of Mixed Ancestry characters increases.

Character Count vs. Character Passing

But only because Black characters are less present.

Whiteness and Racial Passing

The data suggest that while Absalom, Absalom! is concerned with the ‘color line’, it is decidedly from a White perspective.

Race and racial passing is only conceived in how it might trouble Whiteness and not how it might affect the Black community.

Passing Characters

Charles Bon is more present in the text than all other Mixed Ancestry characters combined, but is simply another major character compared to the White characters.

Passed over Characters

Meanwhile, the most present Black characters are the unnamed enslaved characters.

Passing Thoughts

It is clear from reading Absalom, Absalom! that the novel is about Charles Bon’s potential transgression across the ‘color line.’ The data reveal that the novel attends to this issue from a predominantly White perspective, and at the exclusion of all other non-white characters.

The various narrators only really care about racial passing if it threatens upper class white femininity.

As such, they naturalize racial difference, and also circumscribe the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and class.

In the highly fraught social circumstances of the pre-Civil Rights South, there is no way to separate race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Events

“Maybe happen is never once”

Events Overview

Absalom, Absalom! resists summary. It is told from multiple, contradictory perspectives that each re-tell the same set of historical events: Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson and starts a family with Ellen Coldfield. He has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith. Judith falls in love with Henry’s friend from college Charles Bon. On the day Judith and Charles are supposed to marry, Henry kills him and disappears.

No one knows why,

but everyone has a theory.

Blackbirds

Faulkner was once asked if any one of the characters has the “right view.”

In Absalom, Absalom! is any one of the people who talk about Sutpen have the right view, or is it more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them [getting it?] right? - May 8th, 1958 Faulkner at Virginia

His answer is telling…

Plotting the Story

Though the plot can be very confusing, it is clear from Faulkner’s notes that he had an underlying structure.

This underlying structure is sometimes referred to as the chronology or story.

Story vs. Plot

Often used interchangeable, story and plot describe two different aspects of a narrative.

Plot - The order of events in which they are told to the reader.

Story - The order of events as they actually occur. This is also known as chronology.

Sutpen’s Story and Plot

Faulkner does not tell us the events in the order they occur (story). Instead, he reorganizes them into a non-linear order (plot).

We can see this distinction with his delayed revelations about Sutpen’s life.

Sutpen’s Plot and Story

Following the order of events as Quentin discovers them, we learn several important details about him out of order:

  • Chapter 1: Sutpen arrives in Jefferson
  • Chapter 6: Sutpen is killed by Jones
  • Chapter 7: Sutpen is born in Virginia

These should be re-sorted to tell the story.

  • Chapter 7: Sutpen is born in Virginia
  • Chapter 1: Sutpen arrives in Jefferson
  • Chapter 6: Sutpen is killed by Jones

Ordering Events

Digital Yoknapatawpha has broken down the novel into 644 individual events.

An event is any time there is one or more characters at one location for a discrete period of time.

Each of the 644 events in the novel was also assigned a number that indicates its order in the plot and in the story/chronology.

Plotting Events

We can take the plot and chronology data and put them on a chart to show the structure of the narrative.

Chronology is placed on the y-axis, and plot is placed on the x-axis.

Events that are chronologically earlier are lower down, while later events are higher up.

Sutpen’s plot

The plot chart shows the events as they are narrated to us, the story chart shows the order in which those events happen according to the chronology.

Plotting Absalom, Absalom!

The plot structure chart for Absalom, Absalom! is incredibly complex, but the story mode reveals the basic structure: Four different narrators reconstruct the story of the Sutpen family many years after it has happened.

Pattern Recognition

Each narrator actually follows a similar pattern. They start the narration in the “deep” past and work their way into the present. They often repeat similar details, but leave out crucial information.

Piecing it together

We can get better insight into how Faulkner structured Absalom, Absalom! by displaying which parts of the story each chapter covers. In story mode we see a very mottled line with each chapter seemingly covering all parts of the story. By clicking on each chapter legend entry, we can turn that series on and off, and determine what parts of the story each chapter covers.

Storytelling and History

The overlapping and disjointed versions of events capture Quentin’s lived experience of exploring the past. This is not a neat linear chronology told by one authority in a history book, but the collective story of multiple voices who have shaped and reshaped the events to match their version of the truth. The tellers cannot be separated from their tales. It forces us to wonder if any version of the past can ever be true, or if it is simply another story we tell ourselves.

Language

Language Overview

The language in Absalom, Absalom! is very challenging.

Faulkner’s language constantly draws attention to itself.

The text reminds us that what is said cannot be separated from how it is said.

The longest sentence

Sentences in Absalom, Absalom! are very long.

On average sentences are 50 words long.

The longest sentence is 1124 words! That’s a 3-4 page college paper.

A View of the Long Sentence

Compared to other American Classics, Faulkner’s sentences are much, much longer.

Neologisms

Faulkner also concocts neologisms by combining words or adding a prefix to an existing word.

Parenthetical

Perhaps the most unique feature of the text is Faulkner’s use of parentheses.

. . . There are 1278 total or 639 pairs. . . . These parentheses occur across the text, and also nest within each other three levels deep:

  • () Level 1
  • (()) Level 2
  • ((())) Level 3
  • (((()))) Level 4

Quentin

The nestings offer a network of digressions, modifications, amplifications, and dead ends. They represent the constant search for words to tell the story of the Sutpen family.

Appropriately, Quentin is burried deep within this nesting at level 4.

Faulkner’s Language

The complexity of Faulkner’s language forces the reader to consider the meaning of every word, in every long sentence, throughout the entire work. One cannot pull at any thread in the novel without loosening others. The past existed as a reality but it can only be represented in and through language.